India’s BASIS Technologies Contributes to Responsive and Resilient Internet with First L-Root Instance in India

Establishment of instance in India helps further decentralize the top level of the DNS, mitigate certain network outages, and reduce DNS-related delays

13 Oct 2015

Kolkata, India … The first L-Root instance in India has been successfully installed in Kolkata, increasing the Domain Name System's (DNS) overall fault tolerance and its resilience against certain types of cyber threats, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

The launch of the L-Root server node, which was initiated by the Internet Society – Kolkata Chapter, is a joint operation between ICANN and India's BASIS Technologies. A leading player in the web hosting industry, BASIS Technologies supplied the equipment necessary for the installation of the new L-Root node.

"We are extremely proud to be the first L-Root node in India and to start contributing to the stability and resiliency of the Internet. As India's Internet penetration expands, it will be important for other root server instances to be established across the country. I sincerely hope other companies will follow our example across India," said BASIS Technologies Co-Founder and Director, Anand Raje.

"The successful installation of India's first L-Root instance is a historical moment made possible with the partnership of BASIS Technologies and Internet Society Kolkata. This is a testimony of ICANN's commitment to India and we look forward to bringing in more L-Root instances into the country," said Samiran Gupta, Head of India for ICANN.

This cooperation is an effort to enhance the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS to Indian Internet users and reduce the response time experienced when making some DNS queries.

Anupam Agrawal, Chair of Internet Society Kolkata, reiterated, "The lower round trip latency times and the availability of root instances to allow the Internet to continue in disaster scenarios is a step towards resiliency that India requires now more than ever. It is important that the first step of domain resolution for access to Internet should be possible in India and there should be minimal traffic flowing for this outside the country."

"ICANN is pleased to augment L-Root with an instance in India. We appreciate the efforts from BASIS Technologies in hosting L-Root and Internet Society Kolkata in managing the entire process of hosting. Their commitment to both the Domain Name System and the stability and resiliency of the global Internet has been exemplary," said Terry Manderson, Director of DNS Engineering at ICANN.

There are 13 "root" DNS servers, identified by the letters A through M — the "L" root server operated by ICANN being one. Computers typically communicate with each other using numeric addresses, while humans find it easier to use and remember names (for instance, users typically remember the domain name "ICANN.ORG" more easily than the Internet Protocol address, 2620:0:2d0:200::7). The DNS translates domain names into addresses and the root servers provide the pointers to the server for top-level domains (the last part of domain names, for example, "ORG" in "ICANN.ORG").

Spreading the service that provides these pointers out geographically by duplicating the root servers leads to a resilient, dispersed system that reduces the risk of users being taken offline by a problem or attack and reduces the time it takes to look up names on the Internet.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet. ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet's unique identifiers. ICANN doesn't control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn't deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet's naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.

About BASIS Technologies

BASIS Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is a young multiplatform digital enabling company headquartered in Kolkata, India committed to provide Internet based services with special focus on SMEs. BASIS Technologies is also a DOT IN registrar. Our primary philosophy is to work as an innovator organization continuously designing and offering services allowing our customer's gain digital advantage, manage change and withstand the ever changing requirement of doing business. Our expertise is in helping customers migrate from old technology platforms to new one. We are a proponent of IPv6 deployment and offer exclusive consulting services around it. BASIS Technologies also spearheads initiatives that are required towards the development of the Information Society.

ICANN is not responsible for profile content or verification of user details.

Data Protection

A note about our privacy policies and terms of service:

We have updated our privacy policies and certain website terms of service to provide greater transparency, promote simplification, and align with recent changes in privacy laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."